iPad

After a day of meetings there are some strong takeaways from the first day of Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. Interestingly devices played a large and yet small factor in my analysis. First off The Sony Xperia Z tablet was shown off here but crowds were lackluster. In examining the device I was amazed at how thin and light it was - it seemed like a larger iPad Mini in terms of weight and the feeling in the hands.

Steve Jobs was such an amazing entrepreneur - even calling him the ultimate visionary doesn't seem to describe accurately how amazing he was at reinventing numerous business categories. Like so many creative visionaries, early in his career he lacked the political and people skills which many people believed were necessary to run a company effectively.

When he was "pushed out" of Apple it was seen as a normal incident - CEOs were pushed out of companies all the time as past Apple CEO John Sculley has said. In fact Scully spoke just over a week ago at StartUp Camp7 collocated with ITEXPO Miami 2013 and gave the inside scoop on many important events which transpired between him and Jobs over the years.

Sometimes I feel like a broken record MP3 player but when you know you are right and you are a student of history, you see the mistakes companies make before they do. On July 8th of 2010 I told you that larger Android devices would be a threat to Apple. The point was that Apple is repeating its mistake from the eighties where it had its own hardware competing against many manufacturers. At the time price/performance was the Achilles heel of Cupertino but now the challenge is not only price/performance but form factor.

Tom Keating at TMC reported today that Samsung is beating virtually everyone at virtually everything. He discusses how they have become the dominant TV maker but this isn’t such big news at this point. What is interesting is the company replaced Nokia as the number one producer of cellphones – not a huge surprise at this point but a huge milestone as Nokia held the coveted top spot for 13 years.

Why is Apple, a company with more consumer loyalty than just about any other company being threatened by Samsung?

Amazon Prime Instant Video app for iOS is out and in my testing on a 4th generation iPad it worked well. Some complaints remain that for non-Prime users the experience isn’t that great. I for one would like to be able to download video on the app – there is a download area but no instructions as to what is downloadable or how to download.

Alcatel Lucent says providing video to devices is a great new revenue opportunity for carriers.

Samsung has a winner with its Microsoft Windows 8 powered ATIV Smart PC Pro 700t (XE700T1C, a device which is part Ultrabook and part tablet in one. I consider it to be the perfect combination of both worlds, allowing users to do everything they need with a single device. There is no longer a need to wait till you get to a secondary computer to do “real work” as this one does all the things you might need. It has a full array of ports allowing you to plug in a memory stick or hard drive.

Over the past two years, profits from the top eight mobile vendors has risen from $5.3 billion to $14.4 billion for a whopping increase of $9.1 billion and all this while over 67,000 people have been laid off in the technology. How is this possible you ask? I posited a similar query two months ago regarding Corning’s shares losing value – even while they supply Gorilla Glass to much of the booming mobile market.

Google has a new heavy metal-based TV commercial which has a Halloween undercurrent. The ad touts the $249 Samsung-made Chromebook as being smaller, better on batteries and good for “scaring off viruses.” It goes on to discuss its lack of phantom files and crashes. Although the video has had under 100,000 views I can see it going viral and perhaps adding a zero to that number.

What is unclear is how much demand there will be for a cloud-based laptop which seems to ape the look of an Apple computer at a fraction of the price.

Microsoft is jumping into the music business and this is perhaps the biggest news of the day and possibly the week. Redmond is now offering ad supported music streaming and going up against Sirius XM, Pandora and Apple’s iTunes all at once. Boasting a 30-million strong library of songs, users can listen to playlists for free or download to own music across their TV, computers and smartphones. The ad-free version is $9.99 per month and includes access to music videos as well.